Schedule: 11-14 August 2003 at 19:30Cullberg Ballet The Edinburgh Playhouse

Home and Home

Johan Inger Choreography

JS Bach/Amon Tobin/André Ferrari/Bogdan Raczynski Music

Home and Home is a dreamy and witty work by the new Artistic Director of Cullberg Ballet, Johan Inger, known to Edinburgh audiences for his work as both dancer and choreographer with Nederlands Dans Theater.

Fluke

Mats Ek Choreography

Flesh Quartet Music

Accessible, exciting, touching and brimming with good humour, Fluke is contemporary dance at its most entertaining and satisfying.

‘breathtaking beauty, playful humour and bitter seriousness are united in boundary-breaking dance…’ Lanstidningen Sodertalje on Fluke

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17-18 August 2003 at 20:00 Chantier-Musil The Edinburgh Playhouse Sponsor The Royal Bank of Scotland

François Verret’s collaborations with writers, actors, musicians, visual artists and circus artists create multi-dimensional performances which are both profound and beautiful. Chantier-Musil is inspired by Musil’s impressionistic and intensely poetic novel The Man Without Qualities.

‘As every large city, it was made of irregularities and changes, of things and affairs slipping in front of the other, refusing to walk in time, knocking into each other, spaces of silence, passageways and ample rhythmic pulsation, eternal dissonance, eternal imbalance of rhythms.’ Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities.

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21-23 August 2003, 19:30 23 August 2003, 14:00

Picasso and DanceBORDEAUX OPERA BALLET

The Edinburgh Playhouse Supported by the Edinburgh International Festival Endowment Fund

Parade

Leonide Massine Choreography

Erik Satie Music

Pablo Picasso Sets and costumes

Jean Cocteau Libretto

The Three Cornered Hat

Leonide Massine Choreography

Manuel de Falla Music

Pablo Picasso Sets and costumes

Icarus

Serge Lifar Choreography

Lifar/Honegger/Szyfer Rhythms

Pablo Picasso Sets and costumes

The Prodigal Son

George Balanchine Choreography

Serge Prokofiev Music

Georges Rouault Sets and costumes

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28-30 August 2003, 19:30 30 August 2003, 14:00

San Francisco Ballet

The Edinburgh Playhouse supported by the Edinburgh International Festival Muses

A showcase season for the wonderful San Francisco Ballet and one of the hottest young choreographers of today. British born Christopher Wheeldon’s Tryst for The Royal Ballet was acclaimed as the best new ballet of 2002, while Olivier Award- winning Polyphonia was a hit of New York City Ballet’s 2001 Festival visit. Firmly rooted in the classical style, his ballets are startlingly fresh, bringing classical ballet into the 21st century. This programme offers the first in depth focus on his work, and includes the world premiere of a new ballet, created by San Francisco Ballet and commissioned by the Edinburgh International Festival.

There Where She Loves

Christopher Wheeldon Choreography

Chopin and Kurt Weill Music

Continuum

Christopher Wheeldon Choreography

Györgi Ligeti Music

New Ballet

WORLD PREMIERE

Christopher Wheeldon Choreography

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And some articles connected to the Festival announcement:

Difficulty of striking the right balance By Sarah Jones for Scotland on Sunday

EVER since the last sleepy-eyed cultural ingénue was turfed amicably out on to the street on the final £5 night of last year’s International Festival, there has been speculation over how Brian McMaster, director of the Edinburgh International Festival, would consolidate his newly won audience.

There was much talk from McMaster’s Festival office of implementing the results of in-depth market research, although no formal exit polls were taken (probably wise as the level of alcohol in the bloodstream of the average audience member was no doubt over the limit for valid research purposes), and true to word, McMaster launched this year’s festival with the ominous phrase "programming based on the results of our market research last year".

By Ek, Johan can New Cullberg director Johan Inger’s bold steps see him emerge from illustrious shadows, writes Kelly Apter for The Scotsman

They did not know it at the time, but 1967 was a good year for Swedish dance. Birgit Cullberg, already an influential figure in Sweden and beyond, founded her new company, Cullberg Ballet.

And Mr and Mrs Inger gave birth to a son, Johan. Thirty-six years later, Birgit’s modest eight-strong troupe is one of the foremost modern dance companies in the world. And young Johan is about to take over the reins.

As an 18-year-old attending the Royal Swedish Ballet School, Inger saw Cullberg for the first time, and experienced something of an epiphany. "That was the first time I really enjoyed watching dance," he explains. "Up until then, I enjoyed dancing but to be honest I never really enjoyed watching it.

Just before Christmas I ran into Brian McMaster at a drinks reception. There was sweat trickling down his forehead and he had a slightly manic grin on his face, as he quite often does. I asked him how the 2003 Edinburgh International Festival was shaping up. He said that the previous day he had pretty much finalised the programme, but that this morning he had torn the whole thing up again in a state of panic. He swore really loudly. Then he had a blazing row with this newspaper’s Joyce McMillan about the Scottish national theatre project, telling her, essentially, that it was a waste of bloody money and time. He was giggling like a schoolboy as he said this.

Talking to McMaster, you often get the impression that he finds what he does for a living uproariously funny. Perhaps he still can’t believe, after more than a decade as director of one of the world’s most prestigious arts festivals, that he gets to travel across the globe having nice dinners and seeing shows, bringing the acts he likes to Edinburgh, at great expense, where he can see them again.

Edinburgh goes full Cycle The programme for this year's international festival is Ring fenced by the works of Wagner but there are plenty of other choice items on offer, as KEITH BRUCE discovers for The Herald

THERE is a solid, chunky, dependable - and perhaps a little four-square - look to Brian McMaster's programme for the 2003 Edinburgh International Festival. The newly-knighted artistic director - who would, characteristically, prefer that we didn't labour his title (perhaps influenced by the member of staff who welcomed him back after the Christmas and New Year holidays with a commiserating pat on the shoulder and a "and you were doing so well, too") - was to some extent hamstrung by his Wagner.

The Fringe Factor Festivals: As temperatures creep up and summer shimmers on Edinburgh's horizon, Andrew Burnet for The Sunday Herald tests the water to gauge what will sizzle at the Fringe.

Edinburgh's climate is notoriously unpredictable, but there is one seasonal watershed you can rely on. No sooner do the first intrepid rays of sunshine battle their way through the clouds than the Edinburgh Festival is upon us. Last weekend's sub-tropical clambake was followed on Thursday by the release of the Fringe brochure, an unmistakable harbinger of the cultural onslaught ahead.

According to popular legend, the best show on the Fringe is invariably an unheralded debut on a shoestring budget, discovered in a dank hovel up a back alley, then whisked to Broadway on a tsunami of acclaim. The truth is more prosaic but less alarming. Yes, the kissing of frogs is to be encouraged, but study the form and you can usually pick out a handsome prince or two.

Is the Fringe pricing itself out of business? By CLAIRE SMITH for The Scotsman

HE’S been called the supreme master of spontaneous improvisation and his show, Sonic Waffle, was the bestselling event of last year’s Fringe.

But will this year’s audience be prepared to shell out £15 to witness an hour of Geordie comic Ross Noble’s unscripted meanderings at the Assembly Rooms?

For the same price - or less - theatregoers could see the San Francisco Ballet, a new production of Hamlet or attend a two hour concert by a world famous string quartet at the Edinburgh International Festival.

Dance: Sweden’s adventurous Cullberg Ballet returns (Aug 11-14). The Bordeaux Opera Ballet’s Picasso and Dance features the painter’s stage designs for ballets by Massine and Lifar (Aug 21-23). And the San Francisco Ballet celebrates the exceptional (British-born) choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, with a triple bill including a world premiere (Aug 28-30).

AS FAR AS DANCE is concerned, the Edinburgh International Festival has always prided itself on being different. The festival’s guiding principle is to present attractions that can’t be seen elsewhere in Britain, so inevitably there’s an international slant to the programming. That’s certainly true this year with the dance programme, which features the Cullberg Ballet from Sweden, Compagnie François Verret from France and their compatriots the Bordeaux Opera Ballet.

Christopher Wheeldon, though only just 30, is keeping his head. "I'm dealing with it quite well. I think I've managed to find the confidence in myself to know that it's not always going to be bunches of flowers and chocolate boxes. There's a lot of attention, but I take this stuff about the next Balanchine with such a grain of salt. It's just that I happen to be here at a time where there aren't many people around."

IN A ROOM on New York's Upper West Side, a great white whale is flexing its monstrous muscles and making deep lowing sounds. No, I am not seeing things, for Carlo Adinolfi is here, too, although he is such a gifted performer that I'm convinced he is of the order Cetacea rather than of the genus Homo sapiens.

St Petersburg's cult physical theatre company Derevo can do scary (Red Zone, La Divina Commedia) and cute (Once). Here they do both, but to no particular effect, in an ocean-inspired visual extravaganza that seems rather self-satisfied. Many shows on the fringe have verbal diarrhoea; this one suffers from the visual runs.

Their new show, Revolution, is the first stage of the plan. Aiming to deliver show-stopping percussive dance styles in an unashamedly loud, rock-style setting, the show is based on three soloists - former Riverdance member and three-times North American champion Hanna; Schulster, star of the European hit Fire of Dance; and world-renowned flamenco dancer Karen Pitkethly. They are all backed up by a cast of 10 dancers and a live onstage rock band with a lead singer doubling as narrator.

Last year, in La Divina Commedia, the award-winning Derevo spun fantastical images of Hell, Heaven, and the wasteland-limbo that stretched out between them. Black, gold, red were the signature colours of a hectic, revolving extravaganza that travelled from the pits of tortured despair to a final, exquisite redemption. But, as anyone familiar with the Russian company's past triumphs will already know, Derevo - led by Anton Adassinski - doesn't care to repeat itself.

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